Counter-Apologetics

Founding fathers

Regardless of their personal religious affiliations, they deliberately set up a Constitution that was a secular document.

Declaration of Independence

The Declaration of Independence did not establish US law. The Constitution, a deliberately secular document, did.

Puritans wanted a Christian nation

The Puritans did not found America. They preceded the founding of the nation by more than 100 years.

First Continental Congress

The Continental Congress convened in 1774, two years before the Declaration of Independence and fifteen years before the Constitution. Obviously they were not bound by the First Amendment, which had not been written yet.

Pledge of Allegiance

The original pledge was written by Francis Bellamy on September 7, 1892. It is not a founding document. Nevertheless, when the pledge was written it did not contain the words "under God". This was added in 1954.

In God We Trust

"In God We Trust" is not America's national motto. "E pluribus unum" is.

The phrase was added to currency long after the country was founded.

Majority of Americans are Christian

The majority of Americans are also white. Are we a "white nation"?

The Treaty of Tripoli

The Treaty of Tripoli, which was unanimously ratified by the U.S. Senate on June 10th 1797 and signed by President John Adams states in Article 11 that, "As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion..."

Separation of church and state

The actions of the Constitution's authors at the 1787 Convention best reveal their thoughts and intent regarding religion. They avoided attempts to insert worship into their deliberations, keeping religious activities separate from the process of creating our government. If no religion at the Constitutional Convention was good enough for our founders, it should be good enough for all public officials in the execution of their duties.

Our founders created a secular government based on freethinking political philosophies. Our founders' Constitution is a stunning rejection of government under god. Only the Constitution establishes our government, not any other document with pious words, such as the Declaration of Independence, Mayflower Act etc. The Constitution ignores god, except for the date, "in the year of our Lord." "We the People," not god, is the authority for our government. The Constitution prohibits any religious test for national office. The Constitution's first amendment prohibits Congress from passing any laws even "respecting an establishment of religion." During many Constitution ratification sessions in the states, Christians tried to add references to God and Jesus into the Preamble and to remove the "no religious test for office" provision. Their failure demonstrates that even though the Constitution was a heated public issue, it was ratified as written. Our founders and the public knowingly chose a godless Constitution.

Conservative Christians argue that the First Amendment language, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion," means our founders only meant to prohibit one denomination from becoming the official national religion. The evidence refutes this narrowest of interpretations, aside from the fact that the Constitution must give government such a power, and there is no power to do anything religious in the Constitution. In his letter to the Danbury Baptist Association (1/01/1802), Thomas Jefferson cited "a wall of separation between Church and State" as his reason for denying their request for a national day of fasting. Jefferson's metaphor came from London school master James Burgh, one of England's leading enlightenment political writers. Burgh's Crito (1767) had the phrase, "build an impenetrable wall of separation between things sacred and civil." Along with numerous other documents, Jefferson's message clarifies the intention of the amendment.

The Constitution and amendments only mention religion three times, and only as prohibitions against government doing things religious. One cannot pervert express prohibitions against government doing religious things into powers for government to do religious things. Many public officials have a long history of violating their oath of office by mixing religion into government or by supporting religious groups. A tradition of violating the Constitution does not, however, change the Constitution.